To proofread a game's translation

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If you don't get the help you're looking for and you're relatively broke, you can get right about anything done on fiverr.com for a low price. I'm seeing some people offering proofreading services. I got some voice acting done on there and the process was pretty straight forward.

 

Not technically incorrect, but seeing semi-colons ";" in casual speech dialog is unnatural. I'd replace each with a period and capitalize the next word to start a new sentence.

Also, what type of people are these? The way they are talking and the words used I'm imagining little rich kids from 200 years ago. I tried helping but I need to know context of a lot of this dialog to rewrite it.

 

Check Deviant Art. Hobbyist writers are very common and will take commissions including proofreading. For example here is someone charging $0.01 per word.

https://www.deviantart.com/blackmanaburning/art/Professional-Editing-Writing-Commissions-732522247

Check Reddit. Here is a community dedicated to just proofreading and it appears to be free at that but I haven't looked into them too deeply.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Proofreading/

 

They are used often in formal writing, but sparingly. In written versions of casual spoken dialog they are almost never used.

 

They're also used for lists if you need to separate list elements that contain commas.

 

You seriously underestimate what's required to be a good proofreader or subeditor; most people won't notice the things an experienced proofreader will pick up on. It is a skill, whether you understand that enough to value it or not.

Although, I suspect what you actually need more is an editor; your dialogue isnt great, and its mostly exposition. There's unnatural and stilted phrasing, misused words, it doesnt scan well, etc. It needs a bit more work than just a few corrections.

This isnt the best possible rewrite but hopefully it demonstrates that things could be made a bit more natural.

1. “Um, yes, sorry. Actually, I just... had something to tell you.”
2. “There is, um, that woman, over there, who... um, is wearing a hood.”
3. “Um, she is dressed like she doesn’t want to be recognized, but there is no... better way to be noticed than being dressed up like this, here.”
4. “You can see her from here... This is Aethel. The mayor mistrusts her, and... it is surely not without a good reason; her presence, here... It doesn’t seem right.”
5. “Um, she usually doesn’t spend much time in the station, so... I wonder how she managed to know that a train was going to depart to get in.”

to

1. Sorry; I just had something I wanted to let you know.
   
2. There's a woman over there, wearing a hood. See her?
3. She's trying to dress anonymously, but, really, that just makes her stand out.
4. Her name is Athael. The mayor mistrusts her, and not without good reason. And her presence here, now... it doesnt seem right.
5. I dont even understand how she knew to be here for the train. She never spends time in the station.

 

fair enough; it wasnt intended to be dismissive of your work, just an indicator of what I saw as being improvable. hopefully the section Ive redone is useful in some way.

 

Are you positive that you don't underestimate what's required? For the United States the minimum education to be hired as an English teacher is a bachelor's degree, and some states take it one step further by requiring a master's degree. If we add up the time for both of them it's a total of anywhere from 5 to 7 years.

An English professor (a university level instructor) requires a master's degree and in many places requires a doctorate as well which is a total of 10 to 15 years (4 to 5 for bachelor's, 2 to 3 for master's, 4 to 7 for doctorate).

By comparison a registered nurse only requires a bachelor's degree and can be done with their learning in 4 years. Actual medical doctors require either the M.D or the D.O. Yes, the schooling required to become an English professor is the same level of training required to become a doctor.

 

I think that @sxa's example shows that, regardless of what it's called, this isn't just finding and correcting minor errors. If someone asked me to basically re-write something for them I think I'd expect more than 1c per word!

Also consider what these people could otherwise be doing with their time. Sure, there's not much financial value in tightening up translations for a non-commercial game. But you could well be competing against high-value jobs like copy editing for advertising or pitch collateral, and those things can have very high market rates.

 

Just to say a thought, that translating a page to few pages is one thing. But to reflect the story and emotions, as intended by design, requires typically more than just blunt translate. Proper translation of certain games, may require knowledge of whole story before hand. If you considering that, then soon you realize, that $ 0.01 per word, may not necessary reflect, in terms of received translation, what designer intended. So I would put extra attention here, to that detail.

 

Agreed. I did the brief section above without any any what the 'bigger story' was, or what the conversation was intended to mean. Without that information, its entirely possible I misrepresented the whole conversation, or failed to impart something vital.

Proofreading for punctuation and spelling issues can probably be done as 'easily' as you (ie braisque) expect, but that's the lowest-hanging fruit. In the 'real paper' world, that's actually the last step before the final stage; the actual print run.

Before that, though, there's grammar, consistency, style etc, which is the level a subeditor (aka copyeditor) would actually be working at. That's making sure the thing is 'properly written'. And it seems like its the level you seem to be asking for, or at least the level of the responses you've got on your spreadsheet. The job there isnt to address flaws in the plot, article, premise or whatever, though. Its still dealing with the 'construction', not the 'story' or the 'art' or whatever you would call it.

Neither of those, though, deal with the complexities of translation; that has to do with finding the best way to impart the 'story', 'art', 'whatever' of the original in the new language. That's much more complex, and, as Antypodish says, really needs a lot more insight into the whole story.

For example; that first line in my example. I changed 'I had something to tell you' to 'I had something I wanted to let you know' because 'let you know' implies that the person being told would want to know. Its of importance to them. The first version though, implies the importance is to the person doing the telling.
If the person being told is the superior officer to the second, for example, then this change underlines that; you tell your superior what you've noticed.
If the first person is the superior officer, though, they wouldnt even say they wanted to tell the subordinate something. They'd just do it, that line would be redundant.
Between peers, at the same level, it might be different again., perhaps "Just so you know"
One simple change there reflects the relationship between the two characters.

Now, from your response earlier, I think you're saying that you dont feel you need that level of translation, but I do feel you're asking for a bit more than proofreading. And I think its going to be hard for people to do what your asking for well without more insight. If not, you run the risk of lots of lines which scan better individually, but which might not work together in the bigger dialogue, and/or impart something that is different from what you meant.

 

You asked at least for that. Which leads to numerous options, which are suggested and discussed in rest of the thread.

 

Except what it means in your native language isn't necessarily the same as what it means in English. Just because the words can be translated doesn't mean the meaning carries over. You can see this all the time with manga where the scanlators have had to leave little notes in the margins describing what the phrase was truly implying.

We're not putting any words in your mouth that you didn't say. Everything in the following post implies that you feel that the skill has no value. You compared the process of reading over the words to that of a child's skill level and implied they were scammers. There is literally nothing else that post could be interpreted as.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/to-proofread-a-games-translation.653317/#post-4380550

No, the only elitist here is you. You seem to have the mistaken belief that some skills have more value over others with the sole determining factor not being actual facts but merely your own opinion.

 

Then the English version of your dialogue is going to be far poorer than it could be.

I reject that its elitism to point out that you severely misunderstand the nature of a task of you were determined to completely trivialise, and help you understand why that was. Quite the reverse, in fact, the only elitism in evidence is inherent in your repetition of how easy that task 'should' be.

Then get one of your 3rd graders to do it. Because that actually wont hold as true for any other group of humans, except maybe experienced proofreaders.

 

If you have skills in a game development related field, possibly you could exchange services instead of paying for them.

 

Well, that turned sour, and oddly enough it's all over an issue with the way the original question was written.

People are talking to you, but they're not just talking to you. A part of the point of places like this is that things can be found in the future by people running into similar issues. Even if your initial question was misunderstood for whatever reason, the stuff people have said may well still be useful to others in the future.

 

If the OP is convinced that the skills required to do this have no value, then maybe the OP should do it themselves instead of asking others.